Sessions challenges right on China

Few take notice when Sen. Jeff Sessions lashes out at President Barack Obama on the chamber floor.

But Alabama’s partisan pit bull has turned his sharp tongue on fellow Republicans in recent days, pressuring them to back a China currency bill and taking on critics on the right who say the legislation doesn’t represent core conservative values.

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Sessions has branded the head of the Club for Growth a hypocrite for sponsoring a similar China bill when he served in the House. He said he was “offended” by Republican colleagues who have dismissed the bill as protectionist given that two GOP presidential candidates — Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman — have voiced support for slapping sanctions on countries found to be undervaluing their currency.

And he helped deal an embarrassing blow to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whipping just enough GOP support for the bill to defeat a McConnell-led filibuster and guarantee final passage in the Senate on Tuesday.

“He’s fought tooth and nail to get this bill up to and across the finish line,” said one Senate GOP aide who doesn’t work for Sessions.

Traditionally a proponent of free trade, Sessions is one of the most conservative members of the Senate. The Club for Growth gave him a 100 percent rating in 2008 and 94 percent in 2010. But for Sessions and other GOP backers of the bill, free-trade principles have taken a backseat to parochial interests amid the economic downturn and worries about American jobs heading overseas.

“I believe that critics of the bill are misreading it,” Sessions told POLITICO in an interview. “I believe that trade is a mutual relationship — like any contract between two businesses — that should serve both parties’ interests, and it can’t be legitimate if one party is cheating the other party.”

Sessions frequently cites a study by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute revealing that Alabama lost 2.2 percent of its jobs — about 44,300 jobs — to China from 2001 to 2010, an amount that’s among the highest in the nation. And this year, Sessions blocked renewal of a trade bill that allows developing countries to export goods to the U.S. without paying duties. The program, called the Generalized System of Preferences, Sessions argued, allows Bangladesh to export cheap sleeping bags, which hurts a local manufacturer, Haleyville, Ala.-based Exxel Outdoors Inc.

Sessions lost that fight last month as the Senate overwhelmingly passed the GSP extension — part of a bipartisan agreement that will allow long-stalled free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea to come to a vote in both chambers later this week.

But Sessions appears poised for at least a symbolic victory on the China bill. The legislation would require the U.S. to impose tariffs on Chinese imports if the U.S. International Trade Commission and the Commerce Department find that Beijing has artificially undervalued its currency to keep the cost of its goods cheap and attractive to foreign markets. By some estimates, China’s currency manipulation discounts the price of its exports by 30 percent.